teaching - Professor is upset about student comments about her lectures. What should I do?

One of my former supervisors is upset about student feedback for her lectures. There are two problems:

1. If she provides complete slides with information, students complain that she reads from the slides.


2. If she doesn't provide complete slides with information, students complain that her slides are incomplete.

And

1. If she provides webcasts of her lectures, students don't turn up to lectures.


2. If she doesn't provide webcasts of her lectures, students complain she's a bad lecturer.

I know she's upset + it's directly impacting her medium-term happiness based on what she wrote on social media. However I have not talked to her about it. Should I? If so, what can I say? Both problems look generic enough that other lecturers must've dealt with them before. How?

EDIT: Thanks for the advice. Since there's little I can do, I liked her post and left it at that.

Answer

What should I do?

Honestly? I suggest that you sympathize courteously, but do nothing else:

• She's a grown woman and an experienced academic, she doesn't need you to handle frustrations from student feedback.


• You (likely) no longer work at the same university as her.



• You're not a close personal friend of hers.


• You don't have a good idea of what actually goes on in her classes these days, nor what the student body is like overall.


• It is generally the case that students don't complain repeatedly and en masse about a course just for the sake of complaining and regardless of anything else. There's probably something that's wrong with the course (perhaps not even with her behavior) that you just don't know about.

An alternative to doing nothing would be: Suggest that she ask a relevant question here on academia.stackexchange.com. We could obtain more information which you don't have rather than help her via a third party.